I'm working on rewriting the code for Spydon, an addon designed to provide feedback on the addon comm channel. So far, I have it using its own window for a message frame that supplies a hex view of all data it catches. While not fully implemented, I also added a feature in the base code to let it record the entire call stack of outgoing messages and the call stack of registered prefixes for incoming messages. This is done by storing the contents of the call stack when SendAddonMessage() and RegisterAddonMessagePrefix() are called respectively. If anyone has any other ideas of what they'd like to see added in, I'm open for suggestions.

This is what I have so far:

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"All I want is a pretty girl, a decent meal, and the right to shoot lightning at fools."

The hex view now supports UTF-8 characters. Group of bytes used in the encoding should now show with a unique color along with displaying the single char it creates. The patterns it uses to detect these support UTF-8 pre-RFC 3629, however commenting out a couple patterns would support the constrictions RFC 3629 placed on UTF-8.

"Shared highlighting" is also now implemented in the hex view meaning hovering your mouse over a byte in either the hex or char grids would highlight the same byte on both grids.

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"All I want is a pretty girl, a decent meal, and the right to shoot lightning at fools."

I updated the screenshots to show the shared byte highlighting and the new UTF-8 support. Added as another screenshot is the Call Stack display.

I haven't noted above, but the color coding for the message list is as follows:
The message prefix on the left side of each button is color coded to indicate what channel the message came from or was sent through. The color used comes from the game's color settings and can be changed through such. The player is usually the source of the message, but in the case of an outbound whisper, it'll be the target's name. The player name is colored as to the direction the message went.

<IN> - This was a message received through the addon channel.<OUT> - This was a message sent out through the addon channel.<ECHO> - Only appears for messages sent through a broadcast channel like PARTY/RAID/BATTLEGROUND/GUILD, This is a message that the server has bounced back (sends to everyone including back to sender).

The call stack as described before, is a stack trace at the time a prefix was registered or when a message has been sent. As such, the Call Stack display will show as accordingly. For <OUT> messages, this will be the stack trace for the message sent. For <IN> and <ECHO> messages, this will be the stack trace of the registered prefix. For prefixes that haven't been registered, the associated button in the message list is colored red to indicate the problem. In the occasion it's colored yellow, this means the server acknowledges the prefix has been registered, but there is no call stack data available for its registration.

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"All I want is a pretty girl, a decent meal, and the right to shoot lightning at fools."

I'm now in the stage of putting in some finishing touches. I've constructed a Fonts.xml file where all the fonts are managed independent of the default UI. This will make it work like what CSS does for websites. The ones to mimic the chat channel colors are managed by Lua code; when a chat color changes, one call now applies the changes for all FontStrings that are currently using the associated font object. I've also put a message length display where the highlighted byte position used to be and added in a display to show the highlighted byte in decimal and binary along with hex. The Call Stack display still looks largely unfinished and I'm running through ideas of what to put there, possibly a stack count for starters. As I'm having problems with downloading any new MoP beta patches, I'll have to test MoP compatibility after the 5.0.4 patch is released.

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"All I want is a pretty girl, a decent meal, and the right to shoot lightning at fools."

I could give you some manual links to bypass the background downloader if you like.

Let me know which build you are up to and what file you have in your Data and Updates folder.

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tuba_man on Apple test labs : "I imagine a brushed-aluminum room with a floor made of keyboards, each one plugged into a different test box somewhere. Someone is tasked with tossing a box full of cats (all wearing turtlenecks) into this room. If none of the systems catch fire within 30 minutes, testing is complete. Someone else must remove the cats. All have iPods." (http://community.livejournal.com/tec...t/2018070.html)

It's more about my internet connection than the launcher. It's taking me 2-3 days to download a beta patch. I'm forced to deal with dialup at the moment. Since Blizzard is rolling patches out that seems to be twice a week, I'm always in perpetual downloading. The small amount of time I did manage to get on beta yesterday, I tested an older version of the code and it seemed to work. The communications library worked fine and the base method used has largely been unchanged since WoW 1.12.

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"All I want is a pretty girl, a decent meal, and the right to shoot lightning at fools."